He sometimes
endeavored to set on foot a familiar relation with this old man, but
there was even a sternness in the manner in which he repelled these
advances, that gave little encouragement for their renewal. Nor did it
seem that his companions of the Hospital were more in his confidence than
Middleton himself. They regarded him with a kind of awe, a shyness, and
in most cases with a certain dislike, which denoted an imperfect
understanding of him. To say the truth, there was not generally much
love lost between any of the members of this family; they had met with
too much disappointment in the world to take kindly, now, to one another
or to anything or anybody. I rather suspect that they really had more
pleasure in burying one another, when the time came, than in any other
office of mutual kindness and brotherly love which it was their part to
do; not out of hardness of heart, but merely from soured temper, and
because, when people have met disappointment and have settled down into
final unhappiness, with no more gush and spring of good spirits, there is
nothing any more to create amiability out of.
So the old people were unamiable and cross to one another, and unamiable
and cross to old Hammond, yet always with a certain respect; and the
result seemed to be such as treated the old man well enough.
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